Alphabet of Songbirds. . .”J”

‘J’ is for Japanese songbird. . .

Alphabet of Songbirds. . .”G”

A decade ago, I made a body of etchings, Max and Gaby’s Alphabet, for my children.  I made it because I wanted them to know that their childhood was they greatest period of my life.  They decided what each etching should be.  That’s right.  The critical intelligence of each piece was decided by a four-year old and a six-year old.  I’ve always wanted to make an alphabet of songbirds, a great love from my own childhood.  Well, I’ve started them, and today I will post the first four.  I’m pretty happy about them.

Blue Bull (An Act of Theft from the Great Lou Beach)

Every once in a while people ask me who my favorite artists are. It’s a hard question because there are SO many. I often try to name living artists so people can look them up and maybe support them.

A few years ago I got to meet the great Lou Beach who, for my money, is one of our greatest living collagists. Lou has been around for years. He still has a beatnik kind of swag and a soul-patch.  He is one of those cool Echo Park guys that came of age in the 1950s.  His given name was Lubisch. I know this because his daughter, Alpha, is a friend of mine and also a world-class collagist.

I don’t know Lou well.  He is part of the gang I hang with out in Los Angeles. When I am in town, a gathering of art hoodlums is assembled–the great Hudson Marquez (sculptor and gearhead and rock and roll veteran), Billy Shire, (proprietor of La Luz de Jesus, the birthplace of “Low-Brow” art and where a whole passel of us got our start in LA) Ian McShane, (the fine Scottish actor known for playing Al Swearengen; the guy who calls everyone, “cocksucker” on HBO’s Deadwood) and, when he is in town, Dave Alvin (my favorite member of the combative Blasters–the great Rockabilly, R&B, Soul-driven outfit that sound as great today as they did in 1980).  It is heady company to be in, to be sure, and I’m flattered that when I’m in LA, there is a place at the table for me.

The first time I ever saw Lou’s name was on a Neville Brothers album cover.  Lou did the Art for Fiyo on the Bayou and I had been hired to do the next one, Yellow Moon.  I was nervous. Lou’s piece of burning crocodiles slithering out of the Louisiana swamp was one of the coolest album covers I’d ever seen.

I thought, “Fuck. I have to follow this guy.”  Why they didn’t just rehire Lou was unfathomable to me.  After that, I started seeing his credit a lot in The New York Times and he was always letter-perfect–witty, economical, never too much or too little. Over the decades my respect and admiration for him grew.  He knew something about melding images, words and other elements that went beyond the mere cobbling together of things. Lou’s collage work followed a poetic logic–until it was time to follow poetic illogic–often in the same picture.

Lot’s of artists are clever. Lou Beach is smart. What is craft in a lesser artist’s work, is art in Lou’s flawless execution.

This has never gotten him rich, but believe me; anyone who makes collages knows the name, Lou Beach, and we all steal from him.  Hell, this pretty little blue bull I just made? Swiped it wholesale from a Lou Beach piece–I didn’t even bother changing the NAME.

He has just published a gorgeous book called, 420. No, not that “420.”  It refers to the amount of characters Facebook used to allow you to put in a status update. It is also packed with his amazing art.

Buy two–you’ll want to give one to someone special.

Down the road, Lou has agreed to have an exhibition at FireCat. If I’m lucky, perhaps I can persuade his perpetually shy daughter to also show here as well.

And for those of you who want to know what a great collagist is, google “Lou Beach.” Buy one.  In fact, if you’re smart, buy as many as he will sell you. This is a guy I am constantly in art-debt to.  There is a reason for that. He is the best.

Lost Angel

“New Orleans is the only city that loves you back.”– Michael Domenici, DJ and program host on WWOZ New Orleans, Louisiana

While I was away slurping oysters and listening to the best music in the world in New Orleans, Chicago was hatching a new “cultural plan.”  There were four town hall-like meetings to plot out the trajectory of our cultural future. A Canadian company of creatives has it all figured out, because what we rubes really want is a creative culture just like. . .Toronto.

Oh, joy.  Now I’ll be able to sleep at night. The Canadians and the Department of Tourism are all over it. They are on it like white on Richie Daley.  What once was the Department of Cultural Affairs in the city of Chicago is now tucked up the ass of the Department of Tourism. Welcome to East Bumfuck!  Evidently, a tiny little burg like Chicago doesn’t rate an autonomous Department of Cultural Affairs.

Now there are damn few things about which I would tell the City of Chicago to emulate the City of New Orleans in cultural practice, but a few years ago, the cultural revitalization of New Orleans–post Katrina–began in earnest. And you know what? With a few bold strokes, it worked.  Which is not to say everything is hunky-dory in the Crescent City.  There is plenty that is still woefully fucked -up, but their cultural cachet, their profile in the arts, has come boldly forward and is still on the rise. There are more artists, writers, musicians and poets than there have ever been.  And they keep coming.

There are a few reasons for this.  While it is getting more expensive, New Orleans is still a bargain as far as rents go. Their art scene is growing since the success of Prospect 1, the New Orleans Biennial.  Three years after Katrina hit the gulf coast with about thirty times the force of the atom bomb, New York curator, Dan Cameron opened Prospect 1. Unlike other biennials in the world, there was no centralized “pavilion.”  The whole city of New Orleans was used. From the Lower Ninth Ward to St. Bernard,  Jefferson, St. Roq, the Foubourg Marigny, East Lakeview, Gentilly, to the Bywater, every part of the city was included and it was a brilliant strategy. Cameron knew that anyone covering New Orleans’ first biennial would have to traverse the whole city and take measure of New Orleans while it recovered from disaster, dispossession and furious loss. They would also see a culture of no surrender and fierce pride. In short, by taking measure of the city and its art in its totality, even the most callous of critics would be seduced by the charming knot of contradictions that New Orleans is.

The reviews were ecstatic.  The New York Times, The New Yorker, the art rags fairly glowed with positive notices.  Imagine if Chicago tried this?  There is yet another art fair coming here in September.  This, in the wake of the Merchandise Mart franchise, “Art Chicago” going tits-up by their explanation of their own volition.

Boo hoo.

This may seem a bit churlish, but I am sick to fucking death of art fairs or “art trade shows,” is more like it. They are a for-shit atmosphere in which to look at art.  The art itself is robbed of its definition; crammed together like velvet paintings in a Tijuana whorehouse. I take that back. Tijuana whorehouses are far more tasteful than most art fairs.

Worst of all, it is high school with money; mostly a lot of wealthy hand jobs deciding, by edict and platinum card, what “art” is.  The art fair-logic is that dollar bills and brain cells are the same thing.  You don’t believe me?  Take a walk around Miami Beach in early December when the art world clown car empties out and pitches its tent in South Beach. Welcome to the land of spray-on tans, Botox boutiques and cut-rate tit-jobs.  And oh, there’s art.

It’s prom night for the assholes. Artists get to stand around and get patted on the head by de’ rich folk.  In this setting, we’re the help.  We may as well be wearing white gloves and passing out hors’ dourves or parking the cars. Does this sound like culture to you?

What if Chicago tried something like a Biennial? What if it used the whole city to do so, with as many neighborhoods as possible boasting a different kind of art station? What if we tied it in with an exhibition of the greatest architectural exhibition on the planet (which is what our city IS)?  In fact, let’s throw in some celebrations of the finest theater in this country. I imagine Steppenwolf, Lookingglass, Red Orchid, American Blues and too many other fine companies to mention are more than up to this task.

While were at it, we might want to flex those musical muscles as well.  Pound for pound, our symphony smokes everyone else’s.  We also have some other great music as well. Imagine a night of Wilco, Robbie Fulks, Kelly Hogan, Buddy Guy, The Waco Brothers. . .

If you’re going to celebrate a city’s art, celebrate ALL of it.  Put the whole town on display and you know what? You find out that art is a much bigger pursuit and its practitioners cast much longer shadows than what can be housed on Navy Pier.

It’s like the man said all of those years ago.  “Make no small plans.”

Something happened to me while I was in New Orleans three years ago. I began to realize what art meant to a place.  Especially a place that had endured the privation and horror of something like Katrina. My friends down there were making work furiously; writing songs, writing poems, making paintings, drawings, sculptures, often of whatever they could lay hands on because money was scarce and a good many of the art supply stores just never reopened. It didn’t matter–they found a way, and art found a way.

One woman I knew just went around making bottle-trees, meaning she found small glass bottles and affixed them to the branches of the trees–sometimes as many as 200 bottles on one tree–and when the breeze goes through them, they sound like chimes.

She told me, “I only make them because the sound they make is beautiful. . .and the beauty will lift us above the sadness.”

It is a small thing and there were a thousand small, beautiful things done by hand, paint, and song to remind New Orleans of its essential and luminous place in our country and world.  The first day that the streetcar ran again, I was in New Orleans. I rode it Uptown while thinking that the longest streetcar line in the world was once in Chicago, on Western Avenue.  A few blocks after Robert E. Lee Circle, I see a three-legged dog, a typical New Orleans mutt of no discernible breed.  He’s wearing Mardi Gras beads around his neck, and I laugh my ass off.

This is what one cannot kill in New Orleans–the joy.

She Is a Dying Star

Thank you, New Orleans, for your authentic, fierce and relentless poetry. . .

She is a dying star;
A winter dervish,
A shaking semaphore of white lights,
A lovesick comet.

I Was of 3 Minds

The second way to look at a Blackbird:

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

Or Just After

V.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Little Egypt Danced Here

“Well a woman I love is named Ramona
She kinda looks like Tempest Storm
And she can dance like Little Egypt
She works down at the snake farm. . .” – Ray Wylie Hubbard, ‘Snake Farm’ , 2010

There were actually three women that danced using this name–a name that later became synonymous with belly dancing.

Farida Mazar Spyropolous was a chubby Greek girl who danced at the 1893 World’s Fair, or Columbian Exposition, as it was called.  She so wowed the crowds with her “Coochee-coochee” dance, that it was made illegal in Chicago almost immediately.

Another “Little Egypt,” Ashea Wabe, was rumored to be about to dance completely nude at the millionaire bachelor’s party of Herbert Seeley which was subsequently raided and made a front page star out of Wabe and insured lucrative dancing engagements for years to come.

It was the end of the 19th century, the gay ’90s.  Day after day, a new P.T. Barnum came along with a new hustle and new technologies to make all things seem possible; a decade of the boastful American ambition, writ large. In skyscrapers, the first automobiles, half-naked women and an electric-lit gargantuan steel circle called, “The Ferris Wheel,” from the top of which, it was rumored, one could see three states. The World’s Fair made Chicago seem like the most modern city in America. . .and the most American of American Cities.  Architects remade the lakefront with impossible-seeming structures and electric lights.  The city that had burned to the ground twenty years earlier was reborn, a shining bolt of lightning over the prairie.

That dancing-almost-naked thing caught on as well, in a big way. All of the pics of “Little Egypt,” which include many different women, paint an alluring and exotic woman. She (the many “she’s”) was a real looker; big tits and hips–what was then referred to as zaftig– and huge eyes, completed by long, black, inky curls. So popular was this “Egyptian” look, the hookers from the levee district adopted it en masse. Even years later at the Everleigh Sisters’ infamous brothel, there were always one or two girls who adopted this look.

Fatima Djemille, the third woman to use this name in 1893 was such a fox, a film-maker no less than Thomas Edison made two films of her shaking her stuff, Fatima‘ and ‘Cochee Coochee, a couple of movies I’m pretty sure are not on the registry of great American films, but may have been Edison’s own private yank-reels.

Chicago was a hustler’s paradise.  The newly-minted entrepreneurs opened strip joints, gaming houses (complete with dice and card games) in the city’s Levee District, run in the early part of the new century by a gentleman gangster named Big Jim Colosimo, an opera-loving, church-going, moustache-pete hoodlum of the old school who would later get his hair parted the hard way by Al Capone triggermen in their hostile takeover of the city’s rackets.

Chicago was a place of possibility; a place where one could remake themselves and reinvent their lives. Politicians loomed large in the public arena, as did sports stars.  This was a culture based on hero worship. Even gangsters were known to sign autographs.

The largely religious city also made sexuality a back-alley, guilty pleasure and nickelodeon porn “smokers” were filmed in some of the city’s whore houses and forest preserves for nudist films.  Chicago was a city about work.  Vice, lust, gambling and alcohol?  Unless this was your JOB, nobody wanted you fucking around with it. This town has always been full of the cheapest variety of moralizers and holier-than-thou hypocrites who will tell you how to live. . .until they get caught taking a payoff, getting blown by a cheerleader or spilling an eight-ball of blow in front of a table full of detectives (this happened to a guy I know at House of Blues–and yes, he was arrested).  Once the moralizer gets caught, they admit they have “a problem.”  When the rest of us do it, we’re merely moral imbeciles.

What I love about “Little Egypt” was that she seduced a city.  It’s 120 years later and we are still talking about her–all three of her.

The Dime Girl

‎“Hope, is the thing with feathers.” — Emily Dickinson

On occasion, I entertain the idea of joining bird watching organizations or the Audobon Society, because I am a lover of birds.  It makes sense to be among like-minded people whom one can learn more about birds from.  It does. . .until you meet them.

Bird qatching groups are full of the “birdier-than-thou” crowd who lug their dog-eared Sibley and Peterson guides around in an L.L. Bean field bag and appraise you from head to toe when you make their acquaintance.

I’ve attempted to blend in with the bird-wise on a few occasions over the last three decades.  One time, I found myself not far from Cape May, New Jersey on the day of a big gathering to count birds as they migrated; this being one of the optimum migration paths in the country.

I signed up and paid my fee, bought a fancy-schmancy bird guide and a shoulder-bag and took the bus down there from Philadelphia, absolutely as giddy as a school girl to be among the birdy elite.

Let me tell you, Bunky, I was ready.  I brought a new mole-skin, some sketching stuff, washes and watercolors and ink.  I brought my old army binoculars that I’d won in a card game, an outdoorsman vest and a pair of hiking shoes.  I looked like Tony J. Bird-Guy.  I got to the Cape May observation point and started to mingle among my people, the Bird-Wise.

And let me tell you, a more contemptible collection of insufferable, snotty pukes , you will never meet.  When I got there, it was clear that a lot of these people knew each other; lots of Sierra Club t-shirts and crushed boonie-hats–some adorned with one or two feathers. A lot of very expensive outerwear and many epeople sporting zinc-oxide on their noses.

About 25 feet from the crowd, I quickly surmised there was really nobody for me to talk to, so I fired up a cigarette. No sooner than I did this; a pinch-faced old bitch in a jumpsuit and a John Deere hat can sprinting at me. She was apoplectic–stamping her feet and snorting at me, “You CANNOT DO THAT HERE!”

I honestly didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.

I said, “Do what?”

She screamed, “SMOKE! You can’t SMOKE here, fella, this is a sanctuary for BIRDS, Sir!”

I calmly told her that I was outside and technically, that meant I was in the world’s largest smoking section.  I also told her that the birds didn’t give a fuck if I smoked or not.  She then started stamping her feet and turning in a circle and yelling, “You will put that out this instant!!!!!!”

I started laughing because it was so ridiculous–this 80 year-old lady was acting like a fucking two-year old.  I decided that I’d be goddamned if I allowed myself to be be bullied by this fossil.  At this point, a slightly younger old guy came over and said, “Do what she says. . at once!”

Now I got pissed. I told him I was too nice a guy to slap the shit out of a spoiled and entitled old lady, but I promised him I’d have no problem stomping his wrinkled ass and that he should find another place in Cape May to be an asshole and that he should bring the whirling hearse-bait with him.

Soon I had all of the room I wanted in Cape May, New Jersey–word had circulated amid the khaki-clad geeks that I was not good “birder people.”

Boo-Hoo.

When I was a kid I saw a goldfinch on the ground.  From a ways off, it looked like a clump of dandelions and when I got close, it exploded to life a bright yellow whir of feathers and sound like a tiny sun.  It flew almost straight up into my face and I could feel a slight whoosh of warm air, and then it was gone.  It was magical in a way I didn’t understand–how it was one moment inanimate, and the next, it busted to life.

When I got home, I tried to convince my mother that I had seen a dandelion turn into a bird and fly.

My father had a heart-attack when I was five. My grandmother came to live with us to help my mother with me and my seven siblings.  Every morning she would toast a piece of bread and spread some jelly onto it.  She’d then break it into small pieces and throw it out the back door for the birds. I was shocked. In a family of eight kids we were taught it was a sin to waste food.

I asked my grandmother, Mamie, why she was giving our bread to the birds? Why she was wasting food?

At first she ignored me and just looked out the window and listened with this wistful half-smile on her face.  After the third time I asked, she held her finger up and quietly said, “Listen. . .”

And for the first time I heard it. . .blackbirds, sparrows, house finches and mourning doves.

My Grandmother looked down at me and said, “For a piece of bread, you can hear God sing.”

The Spotted Moth

 

On May 16th, 2011, Rahm Emanuel became the 55th Mayor of the city of Chicago. It was a laugher. He ran against a field of mostly-nobodies, and wound up trouncing a career Democratic Party coat-holder named Miguel Del Valle in the primary. The Republicans mattered not a fuck because this is Chicago and we don’t elect Republicans. We would vote for the dead before pulling the pachyderm lever.

I’m convinced, day by day, it’s the worst decision the city has ever made.

It was the perfect lifeboat for Emanuel.  Nobody liked him or wanted to deal with him in Washington, not even his own guys. Once King Richard II decided not to run again, after the 2016 Olympics wet-dream shit the bed and there would be no crowning glory or 5th star for the city’s flag, Daley wanted out.  That his wife was so desperately ill had to weigh heavily into his decision as well. The Olympics thing had to be a pisser. Only Chicago politics has a BIGGER gang of scumbags than the Olympic Committee itself has.  It had to be like a roomful of pickpockets where nobody brought a wallet.  Imagine that summit and how much silverware got stolen at a gathering for that grimy gaggle of assholes.

Rahm attacked the campaign trail with a Calvinist zeal, surprised to be among a citizenry that actually liked him.  He was absolutely the energizer bunny; or weasel depending on how you feel about him.

A friend of mine was at a house-party fund-raiser for him when a question about the unions came up.  He was in the company of the wealthy Democrats; in fact, who, since he got elected, seem to be the only people he spends any time around.  You never find this guy further than ten feet from the power tit.  Anyway, with a verbal wink to the wealthy Democrats within earshot, he reportedly said, “Unions? We’re going to fuck the unions. Nobody wants unions anymore.”

The guy I heard this from is a regular Democrat–very wired, and does a lot of business in and with the city. To put a finer point on it:  He was at a fund-raiser for Rahm.

What one must understand is that rich Democrats in Chicago are Republicans anywhere else.

The most contemptible behavior visited on working people in this city is perpetrated by the Democratic Machine.

Say this for Rahm: He is not lazy.  The guy works like a sled dog. His first 100 days in office were spent cutting fat from City Hall and one must give him credit for that. He went from floor to floor, examining budgets and bitch-slapping those who would waste; taking away car services and making the fatasses get public transportation passes. . .stripping Ed Burke of his compliment of six bodyguards (that’s right, six bodyguards) you’d think the guy was Salman Rushdie. I don’t know who is out to whack Ed Burke, but when I think about it, it’s obvious that it is a power thing between him and Rahm.  It was an easy way for Rahm to humiliate him, and he took full advantage of it.

Say this for Rahm as well, the guy is not a pussy.  He loves confrontation and he loves being right. He was on his best behavior when he ran for Mayor–damn near genial. Once he got elected, his imperious side came out.  He does not like being questioned. He was a churlish tool in an interview with Rick Kogan.  He is always testy with the press. He always lets them know with body language and tone, that he is better than their paltry queries.

Kogan asked him direct questions and while Kogan is always a friendly interview, if he catches any hint of evasion, he’s always ready with a more pointed, and direct, follow-up.  He is never impolite or rude, but you will never get over on him or roll over him in an interview–and it’s best not to try.  Kogan is one of the the best journalists in the history of this city, with a keen ear for spin and horse-shit, and he won’t abide it.

Emanuel fucked up.  This could have been a moment to humanize himself and his task. Instead, he opted to be superior. His flintiness didn’t at all play in this interview.  He came off like he is; petty and vindictive.

I have to admit that I don’t have the capacity to be fair to Emanuel. I’ve despised him from the beginning.  He is one of the new, squishy, malleable Democrats in sheep’s clothing that Bill Clinton brought into fashion.  The assholes who supported the three-strikes law. The Death Penalty. NAFTA. The War on Drugs.  These were the clowns who attacked symptoms with P.R. rather than a plan. The sensitive pricks who “felt our pain” rather than funding education, infra-structure, and housing. Thy gave us the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” band-aid, rather than a bold step forward for gay Americans in uniform.

It also wasn’t only the Republicans who let Wall Street and the banks fist-fuck working people with toxic mortgages. Hizzoner also was sack deep in Freddie Mac, the company that dealt in an untold amount of grimy and toxic mortgages, not to mention endless political scandals and campaign contribution irregularities and has never, to my satisfaction, explained just what the fuck his job was there.

Emanuel has damn near broken the Chicago Teachers Union; now he’s going to work on the firemen.

We also have the G-8 Summit gathering here soon. Rahm has let it slip he will not be cowed by a whole lot of pesky dissent or freedom of speech.  Kind of reminds me of another Democrat who preferred to govern by edict.  Well, remember this, asshole.  The whole world is watching.  Just like last time.

Speak of the Devil…and He Appears

“The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world”- Robert Anton Wilson

Nothing makes religious types more twitchy than images of the devil. Even cartoons and caricatures make the fuckers apoplectic. It’s funny. As a kid I often drew naked devil women–it drove the nuns out of their minds.  Years later, the artist, Coop, made himself a fortune drawing sexy, naked, porn-devil women.  Needless to say, I love these.  Some of them are WAY dirty and man, they are a good time. I still love drawing devils because no matter how comic or antic the image; there is still a transgressive charge that comes along with it. My art dealers used to get sweaty when I told them I was going to make some devil images.  They often tell me, “But those birds you make are SO lovely.” This was their subtle way of telling me, “Devils are damn near impossible to sell, Schmuck.  Make with the pretty stuff.  Don’t shit on the Birthday cake.”

Often I just kept drawing birds because I love drawing them and am happy to do so.  But still I’d
keep a private stash of devil images just because they made me happy.  In this new body of work, there will be no shortage of devils, or birds.  In fact, maybe I’ll even make some devil-birds.

My friend, Monte Beauchamp, published a beautiful book of Krampus images this year.  Krampus also has horns, hooves, a long-ass tongue and a pointed tail, just like a Devil.  But is not a devil.  Krampus was kind of the messenger sent to rotten little kids in an effort to get them to straighten the fuck up so Santa Claus would bring them presents.  You could have fooled me.  The Krampus images are some genuinely scary shit; more devilish than the devils I’d ever seen before.  As lighthearted as a lot of the Krampus images are supposed to be, they are extraordinarily visceral.

In America, a lot of our politics have been hijacked by the religious right. Devil images make them nuts.  In fact, three young men in West Memphis went to prison because they were thought to be “devil worshippers.”  They were accused of the notorious child murders of three little boys as part of a “satanic ritual.”  The community was lathered into a righteous religious froth, and three young men lost 18 years of their lives.  Despite the fact that there was next to no evidence other than them being pegged as Satanists–mainly by the other prime suspect in the murders, a disturbo who kept showing up in the documentaries, knowing way too much.  They were finally released in the last year. It’s amazing what kind of havoc a few pentagrams and a Megadeath T-shirt can cause. It took three documentaries and endless appeals to free these guys.

The Religious Right ought to be grateful for the devil. He is their catch-all . All of the evil these fucktards perpetrate on women, gays, the poor, the working class and immigrants is of no real concern to them; but let one of them get caught in a gay tryst or with a hooker or pulling their own cheeks apart for a lobbyist. . .and whoa; the waterworks start.  The being-bamboozled-by-the-devil narrative goes into full flower.

It is always the devil disguised as a wad of cash. . .pussy. . .cock. . .golf junket.  The devil is always disguised as an intern trying to blow you or making you take cell phone pictures of your dick
and tweeting them to congressional pages. Then they cry like bitches on TV and get all up in Jesus’ crevices.  These fuckers only have one play in their book: That devil–he sure is a slippery fish.

Me and my artist friends used to make jokes about making a whole body of “nice guy” devil pictures. Drawings of devils helping old ladies across the street. . .getting cats out of trees. . .being crossing guards and even the devil changing a flat tire for Jesus.

Flip the whole Christian mythology on its nut sack and piss off the religious drool cases.

I’ve just decided I want to make some devil images.  Not the feral, heavy metal devils; those are done to death,to the point of being boring.  I like the Snap-E-Tom colored devils–the ones that are redder than a monkey’s ass. Wiseass, hot-foot, flaming-bag-of-dog-shit-on-your porch-devils.  Mischief-makers, tricksters, pranksters . . .Randall P. McMurphy style devils.

When I was in third grade, (the first time) the nun would watch me like a hawk while I drew during art class. She was always lurking like a carrion bird, waiting for me to draw something objectionable.  I never kept her waiting long. The crowning achievement was a drawing of her giant melon in the talons of a harpy eagle.  It was actually the first time I’d gotten a REALLY good likeness.  When she saw her big sweaty head being carried off by a HORNED eagle, she went bat-shit-mental.

She ratted me out to my mom and suggested I be taken to a shrink.  I remember going to Loyola. The door said “Psychotherapy,” and I asked my mother who was getting their head examined– Her or me?  The shrink was a nice guy who liked comics and listened to me vent my spleen about the nun.  At the end of my session, he told my mother I had an immense imagination and that it might get me in trouble in the short term. In the long haul, it would serve me well.   Then he told her, “What I’d really like. . .is to get that nun in here.”

The Indian Casino

‘There’s fucked and then there is horse-fucked.  We got horse-fucked. We should have killed you assholes at Plymouth Rock.“–Anonymous American Indian at Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota

“Lewis and Clark went west to see if, A) there was a passage West to the Pacific Ocean by water–which there was not and B) if there were any more Indians to fuck over–which there were.“–Steve Earle

The Bureau of Indian affairs lists 562 Tribal Councils in the U.S.  Almost all of them are now, in one way or another, involved in gaming.  This is the latest gift we’ve bestowed upon first-nation people. The first ones, of course, being smallpox, alcohol, genocide and acre-upon-acre of shitty cinder block structures that somehow pass for housing, on equally shitty tracts of scrub land, known as reservations.

The Indian casino solution started as a pissing match between the Seminole tribe of Florida and the state government there over a high-stakes bingo game. No shit. Bingo.

At last count there were something like 360 Indian casinos in operation in the continental U.S.  The Indian tribes embraced gaming as a way to improve their lives on the desolate reservations with wildly varying degrees of success. They were sold gaming much like every other community is; with promises of better schools, housing and access to health care and services and in some cases, these things actually came to some degree of fruition. In a great many, however, the usual fleas and ticks came along with this grimy industry: organized crime, prostitution, drugs. . .not to mention a spike in alcoholism, suicide, divorce and domestic violence. The shitty cinder-block structures just have better cars and new trucks parked out in front of them. The desperation and poverty remain.

If you are wondering what I mean when I say organized crime, it’s like this. Any heavily cash-money business is a lure for crime syndicates.  It is an opportunity to loan shark, launder money and, seeing as Indian reservations pay no taxes, it is also a perfect place to hide ill-gotten profits. Now some Indian casinos have partnered up with state governments and no longer enjoy tax-exempt status. Still, theft of cash via skimming, short-counting and even dealers palming chips is rampant.

The truth is, that at any one time, nobody ever knows exactly how much money is supposed to be there.  They can estimate and they can guess, but nobody can say for sure. There are counting rooms in every casino where all men and women do ALL day is count money.  Under the slots, in the basement, the dropping of coins sounds like a steady, metallic rain 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This is how it is for successful Indian casinos.  There are others, out West, that are scarcely bigger than a double-wide trailer.  I once stopped at one between Albuquerque and Santa Fe with my friend, Mickey Cartin. The signs outside boasted of it being new and it was the size and vibe of three Taco Bells slapped together as a trailer, if you can picture this.

I don’t fuck around with gambling much, particularly blackjack, in which some math skills are helpful. Mine are non-existent. My pal, Mickey, though, is an experienced gambler and card player. At one time he used to go to Foxwoods in Connecticut and soak them for several thousand dollars at a time. He can always spot a fledgling or weak-ish dealer and he moves in for the kill.  It’s like watching a cheetah looking for the gimpy antelope.  By the time they get wise to him and bring in a “mechanic,” Mickey is on to another table or he leaves.

At the casino in New Mexico, the  lackjack dealer was woefully inexperienced and within eight minutes, Mickey was up $900 dollars.  And then a weird thing happened.  He felt bad and decided to stop playing–to cash out.  This made the numb-nuts dealer furious–just out of his mind.  I wanted to tell him how lucky he was.  That had Mick decided to keep playing, he’d have broken the place in pretty short order.

It occurred to us that this whole enterprise was not staffed by anyone who’d had any real experience in a real casino. With this thought, we couldn’t really enjoy gambling in the place.  It is also worth noting that we were the only people in the place other than the employees.  Now granted, it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, but still. . . It underlined the idea that not all Indian casinos were cash cows, and I’m betting that no small amount of them lose their asses on a regular basis.

For some reason, I cannot stop being appalled at the treatment throughout the totality of American history of the Native American peoples. If they hate us, they certainly have every right to.

On my way back from the West, I got a good look at some of the reservations and it is heartbreaking.  My friend, Mark Turcotte, an Ojibwe-Chippewa wrote a stunning collection of poems some years ago called, Exploding Chippewas and in this collection, life on the reservation is relayed detail-by-unsparing-detail–and with no small amount of humor ladled in as well–all of these poems begin with the mordantly funny preface:

“Back when I used to be an Indian. . .”

It’s funny because the P.C. crowd is very careful about using the words, “Native American,” and then being woefully oblivious to the continuing inequities and brutalities we subject the rightful owners of this nation to.

My friend, Turcotte, does not let them off the hook so easily, though.  In one of the Rez poems, he dares us to take full notice of him and reminds us that:  ‘”Millions scream in my veins. . .”

Moth for the Naked City

“There are a million stories in the Naked City, this is one of them.” –Weekly coda for the television series, Naked City

There are people who have “yesterday”‘ kinds of faces. Those who looked like they should have lived 50 years ago.  Or a century ago. I thought John Sayles did an amazing job casting Eight Men Out.  He chose actors who looked like they could have walked out of the 1920s–the granite-faced Michael Rooker, the perpetually country-looking D.B. Sweeney. . .John Mahoney, who looks so much like a guy from the middle of the American century  it makes even his voice sound like the past, and my pal, John Cusack, who looks like every hopeful Irish guy from the levee district of Chicago’s 1920s.

They are faces that carry the histories of the places we come from.

I’m fascinated by the old television series, Naked City, where the cops look like cops and the people look like average Americans– New Yorkers, actually.  There was nothing cosmetic in this show.  The cops were bulldog-looking-type actors who, in the parlance of the old days, “had faces for radio,” which made sense.  A great many of these actors, William Conrad, Jack Warden and  Ward Bond

had been radio actors.  In the early ’50s, television was a brand new thing and Naked City was kind of television “noir” as it were.

They took on themes of racism, drug addiction, delinquency and recidivism, with a surprising frankness.  There was a reason for this.  Television, back then, was written by playwrights, getting a quick paycheck as well as getting their message across.  There was right and wrong and thankfully, in Naked City, good didn’t always triumph over evil.  It was, for its time, a tough bromide for middle America.  Life isn’t fair, and bad men are as much a part of history as good men. It was not cynical.  It was cold-eyed and honest and knew us for the ungentle species we are.

I’m an insomniac and my favorite chewing-gum for the brain is cop shows.  The sun never sets on the Law and Order franchise. Somewhere in the bowels of cable, 24/7, one of those shows is on. My favorite ones were the old ones with Michael Moriarty and George Dzundza and the young Chris Noth, who was believable as a hot-headed young Irish cop (and later not so much as the vacuous Mr.Big on the “Four Annoying Sluts from New York Show” or Sex in the City, as you probably know it).  Let’s just say, it was never any mystery to me why these idiots were single.

The first seasons of Law and Order reminded me mightily of Naked City. The pie-faced Moriarty’s rectitude and moral certainty was at the center of the show.  The two cops, Dzundza and Noth, were not nice guys, but harried men grudgingly doing their jobs

honestly, but not immune to the unfocused bigotries their vocation has taught them to have, and full of working-class resentment.  In other words, they were believable.

The great Broadway pro, Steven Hill, was the old and wizened and politically savvy and mostly expedient Adam Schiff, who covers his ass publicity-wise at all junctures and is still, somehow, just. I liked that they were imperfect people doing lousy jobs that coarsened them as humans and colored their dim view of the world.

The last great TV cop was, ironically, a career Broadway song and dance man named Jerry Orbach, who was an interesting man.  He logged more performances of The Fantasticks on Broadway than almost anyone in that cast. He was also a friend and confidant of Crazy Joey Gallo, the Columbo family mobster and hit man widely rumored to be the killer of Albert Anastasia in 1957.  Orbach’s performance as a bent cop in Prince of the City redefined his career, and after Paul Sorvino left Law and Order, Orbach was paired with Chris Noth to play Lennie Briscoe, a former alcoholic cop with rumors of a shady past. Orbach took a sketchily drawn character and gave it real weight, imbuing Briscoe with a world-weary exhaustion and cynicism that manifested itself in gallows humor in the face of tragedy.

Briscoe is a tragedy himself.  A failed husband and negligent father who loses his only daughter to the streets, his only defining  grace is as a policeman.  Ever-vigilant, competent and unrelenting, it is the purpose he clings to because it is the only decent thing  that inhabits him.

Orbach played this role until his death in 2004–he worked right up until the end battling prostate cancer.  He was one of those guys with the yesterday face; a guy who had the face he deserved–impossible to forget, and unlike any other.

Out of the Car, Ass-Ho

You have NO idea how many times me and my friends heard this command from a squad car parked behind us in Lombard and Villa Park.

The only way they ever addressed us was, “Asshole.” On Friday nights, we’d drive around trying to nurse a six-pack and a few loose joints and make them last and figure out where all of the young women of questionable virtue would be doing the same thing.  This is before texting, sexting, and even cell phones.

Our best chance was the Ski-Hi Drive-In, which was also a respite from cops.  They’d roll through once or twice a night, but it wasn’t nearly as perilous as driving around town where you knew the fuckers were looking for you.

Eventually they would find us, steal our beer or make us dump it and feel us up for drugs, which we would promptly eat the minute we’d hear the siren and see the lights.

It was cat and mouse.

Wint-O-Green Moth (for Etta James)

“All the good ones die or get murdered.  Jesus: murdered.  Martin Luther King: murdered.  John F.Kennedy:  murdered.  John Lennon: murdered.  Malcom X: murdered.
Ronald Reagan? WOUNDED.”–The late, great Bill Hicks on fate.The great Etta James has died. Her baby face and angel’s voice are gone.

The Sun came up.  The mail got delivered and life goes on, but the world is at least one shade more gray.  If her soaring, soulful rendering of “I’d Rather Go Blind” doesn’t break your heart, well. . .you don’t have one.  If  “At Last” doesn’t bring a sad, mournful smile to your face, then you’ve never been in love.

Miss Etta was the real thing. You know it when you hear it. It freezes you in your tracks and makes you stare at the radio. She was only like herself.

Jamesetta Hawkins faced no small amount of turmoil in her 73 years; addiction, obesity, poverty and finally Alzheimer’s and leukemia.  None of it could dim the thousand-watt smile or the spine-tingling contralto.  If one believed in the music of angels, Etta James was their evidence.

Winter has finally showed up in earnest in Chicago.  Nine inches of snow fell and again my fellow Chicagoans are running around with sparks shooting out of their asses, acting as if they’ve never seen the stuff before–driving like retards, putting all manner of shit in the streets in the name of “dibs” wherein, because you shoveled your own car out.  You now take over ownership of that part of the street; a basic “fuck you” to your fellow citizens and taxpayers.

Myself? I LOVE when people put out folding chairs.  I always need folding chairs.  Some of them even put out step stools which, as an artist, I’m always in need of.  I do like when guys with service industry trucks just run this shit over.  Was that your Lego table?  Sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t put shit in the street, asshole.It’s also fun to watch the Ukrainians swing shovels at each other.  Shoveling your walk in my neighborhood is a big deal.  I have my assistants or a couple of wine-soaked Mexican dudes shovel mine and the old Ukrainian ladies down the street a few houses…some of the Ukie’s get pissed at me.

“Why you not shovel your own fucking stoop, Meester Beegshot?  Why somebody else walking your dog and cutting your grass?  You too good for this jobs, huh?” I get this shit from Uli, who has lived here for 30 years and always shoveled his own walk.

I tell him he is right; I’m way to good to be shoveling snow out there with the cabbage-eaters.  Hell, somebody might see me and think I’m. . .Ukrainian!!!!

He laughs and tells me I’d have to have a bigger dick to be Ukrainian.  That the Irish.  . .”They are hung like fucking CASHEWS.  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

Uli is a funny motherfucker who is also not fond of people leaving stuff in the middle of the street.  On occasion he knocks back six or seven shots of Stoli and grabs his aluminum baseball bat and lays waste to some of the crap left out to preserve parking spots.  It is funny as hell because he shouts and swears while he is having batting practice and nobody tries to stop him.I don’t shovel snow for one reason.  Every year, the first time it snows heavily, all over the nation, there are 50-year old guys, red as a monkey’s ass, face-down in snow drifts, dead like a fucking hammer from massive heart attacks.

No thanks, Bunky.I want to die like my grandfather, peacefully, in his sleep. . . not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

It always fascinates me at the reaction.  This is Chicago.  We get an assload of snow every year, but people still drive like morons the first snow of every year.  Without fail, a senior citizen T-bones somebody at a stop street, or drives up on the sidewalk and kills some poor asshole from East Bumfuck, because they confused the brake for the accelerator.  Inevitably kids go “skeeching,” which is when you gab onto the bumper of a CTA or a school bus and slide down the street with it.  This, actually, requires real balls.  I’ve never done it.  There are a myriad of ways to wind up fucked-up or dead from skeeching.

When I was in high school, there was a kid named Tony Rogles who was the most fearless skeecher I ever knew.  He’d mosey up behind the bus and grab on, riding it a quarter mile until it intersected a really busy intersection, where the pavement had been plowed and therefore no good for skeeching.  I remember he’d go skeeching by as I walked to the corner to hitchhike home. He’s have this crazy smile and a Kool hanging out the corner of his mouth.  I don’t remember another thing about Tony Rogles except this.

On winter days, he looked into the icy face winter–and spit in its mouth.